Showing posts with label grandmother. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grandmother. Show all posts

Friday, January 3, 2014

Five Generations

     While home on Winter Break, I had the chance to scan a few of Grandma's pictures.  These two were especially fun to view.  This first one is of me at about seven months (guessing) and my great-great grandmother - Pearl Selena Astlin Beall (around age 86 - died the following year).  
     This is what was written about her in Grandma's binder: "She was a good person, easy-going, a hard worker, very compassionate, and she treated everyone well. She was tall and thin, with black hair and blue eyes. She raised her family in the lock house at Lock 25, where there was no electric or running water. The house consisted of a kitchen and living room on the first floor and two bedrooms on the second. There was a cookstove in the kitchen and a woodstove in the living room. She washed the family's clothes in a big tub with scrub board and ironed them with a flat iron, which was warmed on the wood stove, that she used to cook the meals. There was no refrigerator but there was an ice box. The water was fetched in a bucket from the well across the road. Meals that could be stretched to feed nine people were served -- fish, potatoes, beans, biscuits, and cornbread. In the winter, there was always a pot of soup on the cookstove. Life was not easy for the ladies of her time. None of the children were born in a hospital -- they were delivered at home by Aunt Polly (the black mid-wife that lived up the road) and the local doctor."

     This next picture is of five generations of Beall-Poole-Null women.  That's me around 9 months old on Pearl's lap again -- Her daughter, my great-grandmother Edna Mildred Beall (she's around age 67 here) - Her daughter, my grandmother Helen Elizabeth Poole (around age 45 here), and my mother Judy Louise (around age 19 here).

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Sisters

Yesterday I took the girls to Frederick to visit my grandmother while my mom, my great-aunt, and my aunt were there visiting her. This photo shows our three pairs of sisters that day: my great-aunt Marguerite Poole Angell and her sister (my grandmother) Helen Poole Null; my aunt Susie Null Stambaugh and her sister (my mom) Judy Null Fuhrman; and my girls Sarah Grace and (drama queen) Sylvie. It was taken in front of the coffee shop beside Grandma's home, Somerford Place.
Grandma was Alzheimer's Disease. She is doing very well physically, but she no longer knows who we are and she is incapable of taking care of herself anymore. Somerford has been a godsend for her and for us; they take care of her exactly the way she needs it, and she is as happy as she can be there. Unfortunately, Maryland's laws are not conducive to allowing for Medicare to finance care in an Alzheimer's unit; when her own money runs out, she will have to be moved to a nursing home, a completely inappropriate place for her at this point in her life, unless she gets lucky and gets a waiver. My family has written letters to our delegates in hopes of their changing the law, and Susie has even had a few responses!
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